Mathematical vs. Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science

Abstract

Mathematical vs. Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science Anyone who studies the history of scientific development repeatedly encounters a question, one version of which would be, Are the sciences one or many? Ordinarily that question is evoked by concrete problems of narrative organization, and these become especially acute when the historian of science is asked to survey his subject in lectures or in a book of significant scope. Should he take up the sciences one by one, beginning, for example, with mathematics, proceeding to astronomy, then to physics, to chemistry, to anatomy, physiology, botany, and so on ? Or should he reject the notion that his object is a composite account of individual fields and take it instead to be knowledge of nature tout court? In that case, he is bound, insofar as possible, to consider all scientific subject matters together, to examine what men knew about nature at each period of time, and to trace the manner in which changes in method, in philosophical climate, or in society at large have affected the body of scientific knowledge conceived as one. Given a more nuanced description, both approaches can be recognized as long-traditional and generally non-communicating historiographic modes.I The first, which treats science as at most a looselinked congeries of separate sciences, is also characterized by its practitioners' insistence on examining closely the technical content, both

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